Andy Baio

Andy Baio is a writer and coder who loves making things. His latest project is XOXO, a four-day conference and festival in Portland, Oregon, which sold out in two days to become the largest event funded on Kickstarter.

Earlier this year, he launched Playfic, a community for writing and sharing interactive fiction games. He's an advisor and the former CTO of Kickstarter, the largest crowdfunding site in the world, produced Kind of Bloop, the first and only chiptune jazz album, and created Upcoming, the collaborative events calendar acquired by Yahoo in 2005. He writes a weekly column for Wired.com, and original reporting on his blog Waxy.org has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, NPR, Newsweek, and MSNBC.

Hugs, Kisses, and Disintermediation

In the last three years, new platforms have made it possible for artists of all kinds — musicians, filmmakers, writers, videogame designers, comic book illustrators — to bypass traditional middlemen and independently make a living doing what they love, without sacrificing creative or financial control. Along the way, funding platforms like Kickstarter have transformed the landscape for how art is made, and enabled a new movement of fans as producers — people commissioning work from artists directly instead of waiting for artists to come to them.